Louis L’Amour’s contributions to the West can still be experienced in Durango

More than 24 years after his death, Louis L’Amour continues to leave his brand on Colorado. Saturday, the Strater Hotel in Durango unveiled a bronze plaque declaring Guest Room 222 an American Literary Landmark, as designated by the Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations.

It was in that corner room overlooking Durango’s Main Avenue, on the very drop-leaf table that’s still there today, where L’Amour wrote much of his long series of books about the Sackett family, beginning in about 1966 until he bought a 1,000-acre ranch west of town in the early 1980s and began dividing his time between California and Colorado.

L’Amour defined the West for millions of his loyal readers, but Durango was partly defined by his larger-than-life presence, validation that the Old West remains a fixture in the heart of the San Juans.

In August 1980, The Denver Post’s Western Slope columnist, Robert Tweedell, called L’Amour Durango’s “favorite son.”

“Although not a native, L’Amour has strong ties to Durango and a host of friends and admirers who look upon him as one of their own,” Tweedell wrote.

Before he and wife, Kathy, bought a historic ranch west of Durango, the couple and their two children would spent the month of August each year at the Strater Hotel. According to accounts, L’Amour was inspired by the polyrhythms of the ragtime piano that played the saloon of the red-brick Victorian hotel, a witness to history since 1887.

Rod Barker said guests such as Louis L’Amour added character and warmth to the hotel his family has owned since 1926. The Strater is naming rooms in honor of special guests, according to remarks Saturday provided by the hotel.

Strater Hotel owner Rod Barker stands with Kathy L'Amour, the widow of prolific author Louis L'Amour, during a ceremony Saturday to honor the hotel's Room 222, where the author frequently worked, as an American Literary Landmark.

“Having people like the L’Amour family come back to the Strater Hotel
year after year is just so very special to us,” he stated. “They
became our good friends and are just such an important family to us,
and we are so very fortunate to know them and have this honor.

“Louis and his love of staying with us and being in Room 222 is the
very reason this whole idea of naming rooms came about starting with
dedicating this very special room The Louis L’Amour Room. It really
led the way for us to take on this wonderful endeavor, our Strater
Hotel Room Dedication Project. We have 93 rooms, and when finished we
will dedicated every room to a person, family, organization, or
business that played an important role in making Durango and southwest
Colorado what they are today.”

Kathy L’Amour told The Denver Post in 2008 her husband first arrived in Durango in 1926, when he was 18 years old, looking for a job in the mines.

In the early 1980s they bought a rough patch of land with great historical character, and L’Amour was a minor investor and chief promoter of a real estate venture to develop a Western theme park and movie set. The project was called Shalako, after one of L’Amour’s Sackett novels. The project never materialized, however.

L’Amour died in 1988, leaving a towering literary legacy of more than a hundred books, more than 200 short stories and scores of movies, including, “How the West was Won” in 1962 with John Wayne, who had played L’Amour’s iconic “Hondo” 10 years earlier.

Colorado is fortunate to have been an inspiration and backdrop for L’Amour’s contributions to the American story. He clearly loved the West and was devoted to the story and the readers who experience the West through his imagination.

“I try to bring every one of my stories as close to the truth as I can get it,” L’Amour told another Denver Post columnist, Jack Kisling, in 1980. “And then I hope that when the reader finishes he will say, ‘Well, now, maybe that’s how it really was.'”